Wuhan was shut down for 76 days, New York City – reopening today – for 78. If we can trust the numbers out of China – which the absence of explosive renewed epidemic spread suggests to me we can-ish – less than two months after the implementation of the lockdown order in Wuhan, new confirmed COVID-19 case counts across the entire province of Hubei (of which Wuhan is the capital) had effectively dropped to zero. In New York City, two and a half months after the promulgation of our stay-at-home order, we continue to see hundreds of new cases daily and dozens of deaths. We should be concerned about this.

There’s a new article out in Nature Medicine suggesting that the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Wuhan is somewhere below 4%. Multiple surveys in NYC have put the seropositivity rate here in the vicinity of 20%, give or take. Given that New York and Wuhan are of roughly comparable size and we suffered roughly 5x as many deaths here as they did there, these ballpark figures seem to comport with the grisly realities. As I’ve written multiple times lately, let’s hope that some combination of cross-immunity (from other common cold-causing coronaviruses with SARS-CoV-2), summer weather, benign mutations of the virus, and perhaps factors yet unknown to us put us, in NYC, at little risk of further spikes in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. But – learning from hard experience what the price of magical thinking can be – let’s also plan ahead this time.

I’d say it’s largely been the actions of hundreds of millions of everyday people that has kept the virus partially in check in the United States since April – I say partially, though, because we continue to see ~1,000 COVID-19 deaths per day across the country; trends are worrying in at least half of US states; and localized outbreaks – the latest in Arizona – continue to threaten to overwhelm healthcare systems. New confirmed cases nationally have been level at around 21,000 per day for the past two weeks, but given the timing of reopenings, and, on top of them, the nationwide protests, I continue to be concerned about new spikes (though will admit, things have gone better than I predicted they would), and again, believe the situation nationally is less-than-catastrophic primarily because the majority of the population of the US has continued to take the pandemic seriously in spite of the greed, negligence, and cruelty of many people in power.

Axios reports that “New Zealand is now free of coronavirus,” while FAIR points out that the “Media Downplay Global South Leadership on Covid-19” in an article that notes that both the Indian state of Kerala and the country of Vietnam have thus far achieved feats of pandemic control comparable to New Zealand’s but with far fewer resources and under much more challenging circumstances. FAIR also has a Chomsky-esque piece up dissecting the “Euphemisms US Headline Writers Used for Police Beating the Shit Out of People” and another with “Corporate media headlines [on police brutality in the midst of the nationwide uprising] revised as though they were journalism.”

Under cover of the pandemic (and now the “civil unrest” as well), implementation of disaster capitalist deregulatory agendas and attacks on journalists/freedom of speech continue apace. In terms of the institution of actual fascism/martial law in the United States though, the President seems to be in open retreat for now (so maybe I was wrong and institutions will save us!), but I wouldn’t get too comfortable just yet.

Regarding the protests, I’m embracing the possibility that we are witnessing/participating in something new in our history that will have an outcome different than what has gone before, though I’ll note that a core difficulty in strategizing/theorizing this uprising is the lack of coherent vision and goals uniting its participants. Right now, under the movement’s big tent, there coexists everything from the modest reformism of #8cantwait to the militant insurrectionism of Decolonize This Place. My suspicion is that participants’ political orientations follow a normal distribution, or something like it, with median view roughly aligned with the radical but still reformist agenda of significantly defunding police departments, or disbanding police forces altogether and replacing them with community-based alternatives. Still, it can be hard to achieve meaningful consensus on goals, strategy, and tactics, when some protesters believe we’re working towards modest legislative reform, and others, that we’re in the early stages of armed revolution to overthrow the state.

If you’ve been tormented and infuriated by the ever-presence of helicopters overhead of late, you’re not alone. Here are some maps from BuzzFeed that show just how much helicopter traffic there’s been over major US cities.

And, finally, for New Yorkers who care about our mass transit system and are concerned about its future, I recommend reading this Second Avenue Sagas post, entitled, “The MTA Has a Transportation Plan for NYC’s Reopening. Why Doesn’t Bill de Blasio?” As has been the case at least since his reelection, our hapless, imagination-less Mayor is out-to-lunch when it counts.

Strange, disorienting, but somewhat heartening days: The Atlantic headlines “The Trump Regime Is Beginning to Topple” (thanks, Mom, for sharing that piece!); Colin Powell endorses Biden for president; US military generals – active duty and retired, including current Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper – have failed to line up behind the President’s call for the US military to crush the nationwide uprising; and former Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, has slammed the President as unfit, while the President himself hides in a bunker.

It’s been three months to the day since I started writing daily about the COVID-19 pandemic, and – as I’ve done occasionally over that time – so as to look forward, I’m going to briefly look back.

Most salient today, on Mach 31st, I wrote: “I have no idea what we do about this [growing inequality and stacking of power structures ever more against those of us who imagine an egalitarian world], though I do suspect that – just as we’ll see explosions of consumption and revelry when this is finally over (and perhaps before, fueling second or third waves of infection) – the massive popular uprisings that will follow the pandemic will likely dwarf those that were already escalating globally through 2019. We can hope.”

We don’t have to hope anymore, because a massive global uprising is upon us. Wish I could say I actively foresaw the shape this would take, but, of course, I did not.

A few thoughts: We should stay vigilant about the “whirring away” of the “the status-quo-preservation machine” about which I wrote yesterday; the round-up of news above suggests to me that the establishment, broadly speaking, has decided conclusively that our current President is bad for business. Or no longer good for business. We’d be well served to remember that Powell is one of history’s more heinous war criminals (though outdone by former President, and Powell’s former boss, George W. Bush, who’s also been getting some good press for refusing to endorse the sitting President’s bid for re-election); that Esper, Mattis, and other leading generals are creatures of the military-industrial complex (which I abhor, but respect; as I put it to a friend yesterday, the Pentagon “is by far the most visionary and avant garde branch of the USG”); and that, regardless of how The Atlantic frames matters, this uprising is about more than our current President and electoral politics. Let’s see Powell, Mattis, and others come forward, for example, to call for the repeal of the 2017 tax cuts, removal of all Federal judges nominated by this President, comprehensive reversal of this Administration’s deregulatory agenda, etc. Or even further, let’s see them and their like confront US imperialism abroad and colonialism and racism at home, just as the protesters are doing.

We should also stay vigilant about the pandemic (which is still still a thing). I wouldn’t put over much stock in claims that SARS-CoV-2, via mutation, is “Getting Weaker,” nor would I invest over much hope in cross-immunity, warm weather, or any of the other hopeful hypotheses floating around until we have good reasons to believe them. Enough people are still dying daily in New York to make COVID-19 the first or second leading daily cause of death in the City, and we’ve still been registering 500+ new daily COVID-19 cases across the five boroughs. The virus is still around, and Dr. Anthony Fauci – with whose claims I generally maintain an arm’s-length relationship – is no doubt correct in pointing out that the mass demonstrations are “a perfect set-up for the spread of the virus.” Looking to Brazil and India, we see major countries (with a combined ~20% of the world’s population) following our lead into uncontained epidemic. In short, there are many unknowns, and we can hope that factors yet ill-understood may mediate the toll of the pandemic going forward, but until we have clarity regarding those factors, we should continue to plan for a present and near future where COVID-19 remains a deadly and serious threat. (Remember how it crippled the global economy, and killed, conservatively, half a million people in a matter of months?)

That’s probably enough for today. I thought this episode of The Red Nation Podcast – on abolition – was very compelling. The words of Emmy Rakete, in particular, stand as a rebuke to status-quo-oriented “centrism”; the call for world revolution is a heady one, but I understand why people in Palestine, or Ferguson, or Standing Rock, or Aotearoa/occupied Māori territory would support it. (Incidentally, regarding abolition, attending CR10 in 2008 was a turning point in my own political life.)

This episode of Reveal – especially the interview with Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who breaks down the history of policing in the US – was excellent.

And this long piece by Matt Stoller on “Corporate Power, Protests and the Breakdown of a Social Contract” does a nice job tying together the causes of the current uprising with the collapse of the New Deal social contract, the neoliberal assault on all things public, and the re-ascendance of corporate monopoly power in the United States.

The last three months have felt like three years; here’s hoping the next thirty years follow in the spirit of the last three days.

Good news. Governor Cuomo (people remember our savior from April?) has announced a “Say Their Name” reform agenda, so I think we’re all set on the protests now…

A week ago, I wrote – of my experience as a (naive, confused, but committed) participant in the movement in Oakland that rose up in response to the police murder of Oscar Grant in early 2009 – that I was involved “from the time of the initial explosion of anger, through the cooptation of the movement, and to the point of its eventual suppression under withering assault by militarized police and a politicized judiciary.” When we see Andrew “#PAndrew” Cuomo moving to usurp the rhetoric of the moment, and when Al Sharpton is eulogizing George Floyd (nothing against the Reverend, but he has a way of materializing whenever popular anger over police brutality and killings boils over; he was there after Oscar Grant was murdered, just as he was there after the police killing of Michael Brown), you know that the status-quo-preservation machine is whirring away as it’s meant to. Whether or not its successful is another matter, but people ought to remain vigilant about what’s real and what’s not. (Campaign Zero put out a thorough, robust program for police reform in August of 2015; where was the Governor then?)

Speaking of not real, if you saw reports (say from The Daily News, Fast Company, CNBC, the New York Post…) suggesting that there were no new confirmed COVID-19 deaths in NYC on Wednesday, they were misinformation. Sadly, David Dayen (whose Unsanitized newsletters I often reference) and Tech:NYC (whose COVID-19 newsletters I, at least, receive) both referenced this claim without fact checking. Here’s what I wrote to David:

Re: the Daily News reporting on “zero confirmed deaths” on Wednesday the 3rd, this is more of the same smoke and mirrors that innumerate (or dishonest) reporters have been engaging in since March. A quick visit to the official NYC COVID-19 data portal will show that: 1) at the top of all the graphs, it clearly reads, “Due to delays in reporting, recent data are incomplete”; and 2) now, three days later, the City is showing what looks like at least dozens of deaths on Wednesday. (I checked the spreadsheet, and current Wednesday numbers stand at 7 confirmed, 18 probably; usually, the numbers aren’t finalized for at least a week, and they also still reflect an undercount as you’ve addressed repeatedly.)

Against the backdrop of the mass protests and COVID-19 amnesia/delusion, this misreporting can be quite dangerous.

See the bottom of the page for screen captures that document this point. On the positive side, I thought Dayen’s take on epidemiologists overstepping their mandate was spot on:

It’s possible and even reasonable to say that systemic racism is an ongoing health threat and therefore worth risking COVID-19 to fight it. But an epidemiologist shouldn’t be in the position to make that call. This continues a troubling run: the wild swings in modeling expected deaths despite a lack of data, the initial claim that masks don’t work unless you’re a doctor, and now this.

Epidemiological warnings against outdoor gatherings were widespread when there were “reopen the country” rallies. I’d prefer my science come unfiltered. If the evidence is that it’s hard to spread this virus outdoors and people who wear masks should be fine, say that and leave it there. To editorialize risks the integrity of scientific study, in my view.

The Intercept reports that the Pentagon war-gamed, in 2018, a “Gen Z Rebellion” scenario dubbed “Zbellion”; the short synopsis of the scenario, drawn from the Pentagon’s own FOIAed strategic document, makes for interesting reading. The Wire – an independent media outlet in India – writes, “The diversity of the [never before seen] protests [in the US] is similar to the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act marches in India.” And this demonstrator playing the Star Wars “Imperial March” as riot police troop by still has me laughing.

People may appreciate these long Twitter threads from Leo Gertner (summarizing his findings from a law school capstone paper on “police union contracts & the use of force”; I’ll highlight this line, “All that said, the problem of police unions shouldn’t be an invitation to attack public sector unions”); andi zeisler (dismantling the concern/question: “But if there are no police who will go after RAPISTS???” by outlining for just how much sexual violence police themselves are responsible, and pointing to how dismal the record of the NYPD has been, in particular, on “Systematically Undercount[ing] Rapes”); and Hannah Shaw, a former staffer in Mayor de Blasio’s office who “was arrested by NYPD for violating @NYCMayor’s curfew while participating in a peaceful protest, and then questioned by the FBI” about her political beliefs. (Such FBI questioning has, apparently, been widespread.) This damning satire of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s response to police brutality unleashed on peaceful protesters also merits a watch, and I’ll recommend again the latest episode of Glenn Greenwald’s System Update – I found comments on goals, strategy, and tactics for the uprising from Benjamin Dixon especially illuminating.

As I’m now hearing helicopters directly overhead again, and a demonstration starts at Washington Square Park soon, I’ll take the noise as my sign to wrap and head over there to socially-distantly get involved.

Postscript: As promised, screenshots from NYC’s COVID-19 data portal follow:

We can’t let the pessimism/cynicism engendered by past experiences blind us to the possibilities and opportunities of a new and different future. Briefly, here’s what I hope:

That owing to cross-immunity or some other as yet unidentified factor(s) (which an article shared with me by my friend Frank in the UK refers to as COVID-19 “dark matter”), the pandemic does not resurge in New York as I fear it might, and that, across the country and around the world, the toll of COVID-19 proves far less deadly and catastrophic than the most dire prognostications suggest it might.

That the mass uprising across the United States marks a watershed moment which commences a sharp turn away from the politics of neoliberalism, a stark rejection of rising neofascism, and a shift towards democratic socialism or something like it.

That in the wake of pandemic and owing to the political breakthrough/transformation about which many of us have long dreamed, it becomes possible to initiate drastic, holistic, Green New Deal-style (or, perhaps even better, Red Deal-style) action to address the global climate crisis which, no matter what you may have read, continues to escalate even with the modest pandemic-related emissions reductions. (Think about it like this: You’ve fallen off a cliff. You’ve been accelerating. (Ignore critical velocity for now, if you would.) But then, mid-fall, a painful insect bite or something causes you to cup your hands, which, you realize, are now catching the air and slightly decreasing your downward acceleration. Great! But… you are still accelerating towards the ground as you fall off a cliff.)

And here are a few anecdotal reasons why I continue to have deep misgivings:

The sign I saw at a demonstration at Stonewall earlier this week reading, “We fought COVID-19. Now we are fighting police brutality.”

The knowing half-joke I overheard at a demonstration at Union Square yesterday that, “We should definitely all get COVID tested.”

The message I received from someone asking to reschedule a FaceTime call because of the “race riots.”

The comment I overheard yesterday from inside a Thai restaurant on West 4th Street (where people stood in the doorway picking up their takeout) that, “It’s a race war, so you can drink outside.”

Where these big hopes and small reasons for big fears may meet is yet to be seen, but I’ll be surprised if we don’t see a significant national spike in COVID-19 cases, then hospitalizations, then deaths starting around the end of next week.

Brief Twitter roundup – as I’m sure most of you are aware: Police (who are tired) have continued bumrushing, beating, and arresting nonviolent protesters (in Brooklyn); arresting essential workers while they work (in Manhattan); nearly killing peaceful old men (in Buffalo); dragging away non-violent demonstrators and leaving others incapacitated in pools of blood (in Williamsburg); and randomly shooting pepper balls at moving vehicles that contain pregnant women (in Denver), among other brutal outrages.

You may have also seen that: New York County Supreme Court Justice James Burke has effectively suspended habeas corpus in New York; full-grown (non-police white) men are evidently assaulting little (white) girls to prevent them from calling for justice for George Floyd; and Lin-Manuel Miranda may not be the hero of racial justice some people thought he was…

Also, a friendly reminder, people say a lot of things on the Internet, but not all of them are necessarily true. Not sure if “Kett[l]ing was created by the Israelis to contain the Palestinians,” and confident that we, here, in New York City are definitely not “in the occupied West Bank,” but part of the point is well taken, as it is undeniable that the NYPD, and many US police forces, have trained with the IDF for years.

If you want to experience a brief, painful descent into Left infighting and the vagaries of “culture war,” “identity politics,” and a whole lot of other phrases I’d scarequote because I’m not actually sure how to name what’s going on here, you can retrace my steps from Doug Henwood’s Tweet regarding the right-wing media embrace of journalist Michael Tracey (who may or may not be “progressive” or “left-wing,” and apparently was both opposed to the Russiagate hysteria from the left, but is also sometimes a darling of the alt-right) who defends Intercept reporter Lee Fang, for whom I have a lot of respect, who’s been attacked for sharing a video interview – with a (Black) protester in Oakland – in which the protester seems to draw a false equivalence between police murder of Black people and so called “Black-on-Black crime.”

(I actually agree – as my previous posts have made very clear – with Tracey’s alarm about the sudden about-face, including by many epidemiologists and public health professionals, regarding the importance of taking measures to prevent the explosive spread of COVID-19. (I think about-face is one of those military metaphors that has insinuated itself deeply into our language/culture.) However, when Tracey shares cherry-picked articles about journalists being “sucker-punched” by protesters, he’s being statistically dishonest, to say the least.)

Ross Barkan – who points out that “[c]alling for Bill de Blasio to resign is cathartic but isn’t actually going to change anything – has an excellent piece up on “Why […] the NYPD [Is] So Powerful.” I’ll note that I have called for de Blasio to resign relative to his persistently disastrous handling of the pandemic, and based on my view that, for most of his second term, he’s been absentee when the City could really use/have used an engaged, present, competent executive. Regarding the uprising, police brutality and unaccountability, etc., I agree with Barkan; I’d be happy to see de Blasio resign regardless, given what a disaster his mayoralty has become, but fear that his resignation would be perceived as a “victory” by some when it would do little or nothing to address the underlying structural factors which account for the frightening power of the police, many of which Barkan outlines in his piece.

I hope Murtaza Hussain is correct and that “Protests Over George Floyd’s Killing [Have] Exposed [The President] as a Lame-Duck Authoritarian,” but we’d do well to recall that, throughout the nearly four years of this Presidency, as people have railed against, mocked, and derided the kleptocratic buffoon in the White House, he/his Administration has overseen a far-reaching and highly effective program of tax cuts, deregulation, installation of young, Far Right judges, etc., etc. Just yesterday, the President issued an executive order (which will be challenged in court, and will likely not hold up), attempting to use pandemic-related emergency powers to make it harder for sub-national governments in the US to block fossil fuel pipeline projects. (For a counter point to Hussain’s take, I recommend Mehdi Hasan’s conversation with scholar of fascism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat; they are in agreement that we dismiss the threat posed by our President at our own peril.)

Finally, it’s not only Twitter (or social media more broadly) where one encounters spurious claims online. This Washington Post article asserts that the “U.S. spends twice as much on law and order as it does on cash welfare.” This claim, narrowly, may be true, but it’s highly deceptive. Most people don’t have the savvy to differentiate between cash welfare, and the other immense – if insufficient and deeply flawed – social welfare programs (chief among them, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) that the Federal Government administers. Here’s an excellent (long, paywalled) piece from Catalyst that shows that the US:

spends roughly $250 billion a year on prisons, police, and the courts, at all levels of government. This is considerably more than any other state in world history. Yet it also spends upwards of $3 trillion on social policy. Even if we count only that fraction of social policy which is spent on the poor (i.e., roughly that fraction which could strictly be tallied as part of the state’s war on the root causes of crime), the figure is at least $1 trillion. To wit, the US government spends at least four and perhaps as much as twelve times more on programs that fight the root causes of crime than on repressing its symptoms.

The article, entitled “The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration,” goes on to show that, while the US trails more or less all its OECD/rich country peers, often by a wide margin, it still has (as the numbers above would suggest) a more than 10 / 1 ratio of “Social Spending / Penal Spending.”

To get things right going forward, and to not simply get fooled again – because a mayor resigns, or a police budget is marginally cut, or a few unenforceable rules are put in place, or a pandemic preparedness plan is produced then shelved to gather dust and left unfunded, etc., etc. – we need to be deep in the weeds of how the system actually works and what it would mean to actually change it. As is often the case, Glenn Greenwald offers an especially nuanced take, this time on the disagreements on the Left regarding goals, strategy, and tactics in the midst of the nationwide uprising unfolding across the US.

Wish I could say I have a clear sense where all this is headed, but I don’t; for me – as I suspect is the case for many of you– hope and fear, inspiring dreams and harsh realities are at loggerheads in my heart.

Postscript: This note is more for posterity, but I just noted that, in the midst of all this, the Dow Jones was up more than 800 points today and stands above 27,000 again. The Fed money cannon is clearly doing what it was intended to, the rest of the country and the world be damned.

In New York City, we are witnessing in real-time the much-warned-about abuse of draconian pandemic-justified emergency powers. Having rallied the full might of the billionaire class to his aid, and under cover of suppressing looting, Governor Cuomo now seems intent on playing the not-so-petty tyrant. For those of us in New York and engaged with the uprising, or even just to anyone paying attention on Twitter, it’s been obvious from the outset of this cycle of mass peaceful protest and ever-more-brutal police repression that hand-wringing from authorities about property destruction has been a canard meant to distract from the unrelenting attempt to suppress the mass movement in the streets.

How can one easily discern this fact? Countless time-stamped videos from the past week show looting – which I’ve made clear elsewhere I think is counterproductive tactically – ongoing in SoHo and Herald Square, while, at the same time, other time-stamped videos show massive police mobilizations against peaceful protesters elsewhere in the five boroughs (though primarily in Manhattan and Brooklyn). If it’s really about preventing property destruction, etc., then why not focus on the amply-documented looting and leave the obviously peaceful protesters be? Clearly, because it’s actually primarily about suppressing the uprising, even at the cost of drastically curtailing civil liberties about which our useless Mayor and autocratic Governor obviously care very little.

Okay, going to speed through some references: Doubt what I’m asserting above? Read this Twitter thread from Frederick Joseph – the Big Brother-style digital billboard of Cuomo, and the police hunting down of protesters speak volumes.

What else? As mentioned previously, white vigilante gangs have patrolled the streets of Philadelphia with bats and clubs (they “beat the shit” out of this reporter). Reporters also keep getting attacked by police, though, who, across the country, continue not to hesitate to tear-gas, beat, grope (and then beat) and shoot demonstrators. (Meanwhile, the “US Bureau of Prisons pepper-sprayed a man to death […] at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park” in Brooklyn yesterday. As Ross Barkan Tweets, the same “progressive” politician to whose post I link in the previous sentence was “supportive of an effort in 2015 to hire 1,000+ new police officers, one year after Eric Garner was killed in New York City.”) There may be Blackwater-style mercenaries patrolling the streets of Washington DC, and, at very least, the practice of police obscuring all their identifying information has, against the backdrop of the national uprising, now become commonplace, but the fucking assholes who run our City and State believe, as Mayor de Blasio put it this morning, that the NYPD has used “as light a touch as possible,” and, as Governor Cuomo put it this morning, that it is a “hyper-partisan political attack” to claim that NYPD officers were “bludgeoning peaceful protesters in NYC with batons,” which, as much of the world has now seen, they were.

As one Twitter user put it, “Trump holding a Bible upside down in front of a church he’s never been to surrounded by peaceful protesters being tear gassed by military police is absolute surrealism.”

As another put it, “Am I having a stroke or did the paper of record just publish a call to crush a popular uprising by turning the American military against the country’s citizens[?]”

This thread mocking de Blasio, at least, is very funny, and I’m heartened to see #8cantwait (“Data proves that together these eight policies can decrease police violence by 72%.”) trending, though fear the proposed reforms miss the heart of the matter – the outsized power, outsized budgets, and utter unaccountability of the police, which tend to undercut the usefulness of laws meant to check their abuses (and even the efficacy in seeking justice of video documentation of their crimes). Still, the eight proposed reforms would represent real progress if implemented widely (I’d say at a national-level, but it seems that these would mostly require police department by police department implementation and enforcement given our localized system of policing), and to some extent answer the plea, made by Steve Randy Waldman in this excellent post, “that all sides take into account the very real risk of mass [COVID-19-related] death that attends the path that we are currently on, and find ways to deescalate from epidemiologically dangerous tactics without betraying causes and values that are inviolable.” He further expresses hope, mirroring some of my own, that “the movements on the street coalesce around […] concrete demands that won’t be sufficient to remedy centuries of white supremacy, but […] will address […] urgent concerns and allow them to declare this battle won.” I don’t share his hope that the “police revert to a strategy of accommodate, protect, and deescalate” for the simple reason that I think that’s utterly wishful thinking out of step with objective reality, and, while I continue to feel that having clear legislative and policy demands is a good idea tactically, I fear that the escalations in state violence in recent days make it nearly impossible to step back from the ledge of martial law and opposition to it.

On the pandemic (still a thing, and rapidly escalating in Brazil, Egypt, India, and elsewhere around the world), my friend Frank in the UK pointed me to a study from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology suggesting that ~40-60% of unexposed [to COVID-19] individuals” may still have some level of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 owing to cross-immunity “between circulating ‘‘common cold’’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.” If these results are confirmed through further research, they would, of course, be great news, and radically lower the threshold for reaching herd immunity (pending other factors, chief among them, that exposure to SARS-CoV-2 provides meaningful/lasting immunity in the first place).

The White House keeps lying about everything (but especially Antifa). Doug Henwood provides clear graphical evidence that “NYC has way too many cops.” Insurgent left-wing Democrats won encouraging local and state-level victories all across the country this week. Please do read up on the Poor People’s Campaign, if you haven’t already. And while you’re at it, you may want to continue to make connections between our struggles for justice within the United States, and the many struggles for justice globally, often against United States policies and imperialism. Also, it’s the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre (another incident of massive, well-documented state violence that no amount of denial can erase), and police have pepper-sprayed protesters in Hong Kong during a tribute to the massacre victims.

But to circle back to where I started, the police have been hunting protesters in the streets of New York, and I think we need new responses to their violence. I’ve only been at day-time protests in my own neighborhood, and have not witnessed any of this round of police brutality personally, but many reports online detail police preventing protesters from accessing – so as to be able to head home in advance of the curfew – Subway stations, only to then hound these same protesters (and, of course, those who had no intention of going home early in the first place), seeking to divide large groups into smaller ones and surrounding and cordoning off protest marches before eventually brutalizing and arresting people, and generally taking a predatory and military-style approach to the nonviolent demonstrators. While images and videos of the brutality may be swinging public opinion nationally and globally in favor of the demonstrations, I’m not sure how long that effect will hold against the propaganda apparatus that is the corporate media (see the Tom Cotton letter in the New York Times), and I question the wisdom of continuing to allow ourselves to be hunted, beaten, locked up, etc. except to the extent that this is explicitly our intention (a la the 1963 Birmingham campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference).

Is this what we’re doing? I can’t really tell.

Let me explore this further, lest my position seem contradictory. To the extent that an SCLC-style appeal to public and political conscience is our goal, we should probably explicitly oppose looting (unless, cynically, we hope the looting will actually encourage more police brutality against non-violent demonstrators, thus amplifying the popular emotional appeal of witnessing them being brutalized; even then, the looting serves to undermine the moral position of the movement as a whole, nor do I think the occurrence of looting is necessary to trigger police violence – the former only serves to justify the latter), and yet, it seems almost a point of doctrine on the Left that opposition to looting is reactionary because: Private property. Jeremy Scahill – whom I admire – spoke of “pearl clutching” on this front (without differentiating between the looting of corporate brands and small businesses) and Decolonize This Place, in their anti-capitalism, is explicitly in favor of property destruction as one along a spectrum of revolutionary tactics.

On the latest episode of Intercepted, Scahill’s guest, Dr. Keisha Blain – whose comments on the “Red Summer” of 1919 and the life and legacy of Ida B. Wells, I found especially illuminating – clearly struggled to address the question of property destruction, but eventually seemed to settle on an all-of-the-above framing of what makes mass uprising politically effective, and yet, it’s very clear that the simultaneity of mass peaceful demonstration and a certain amount of looting/property destruction is being used, cynically, by politicians like our President, Governor, and Mayor, to justify the brutal crackdowns. Corporate media, already not a friend to Left/progressive mass movement, then further muddies the water through both-sides-ism in their reportage, seeming to suggest that the occurrence of any looting at least partially justifies the police brutality. (Readers who have followed corporate media coverage of “the Israel-Palestine conflict” will be intimately familiar with this form of journalistic sleight of hand.)

For 50 years, mass urban uprising as undisciplined melange of protest, burning, looting, and all the rest, has patently failed to win meaningful victories in this country – limited counterexamples exist, but the very fact that we are here, today, facing these circumstances more or less makes my point for me. People on the Left don’t want to oppose looting because they fear their stance will be interpreted as reactionary and might serve to divide the movement, but a wedge is already clearly being driven by those in power – a distinction being made and exploited – and, as again evidenced by Twitter, many everyday people, including many sympathetic with calls for justice, are disgusted and outraged by instances of looting of small businesses (videos of which are, of course, being circulated and exploited by enemies of the uprising for their own reasons which have little to do with the destruction of mom-and-pop’s life’s work).

An undisciplined movement will eventually be divided, worn down, and crushed, just as past such movements/uprisings have been, and what feels like principle – in affirming the understandability, the justifiability, the inevitability, etc. of looting – is actually just laziness and fear of confronting the question: What would it actually take to organize and win?

A march that crescendos with tens or hundreds of thousands of participants can end with a few scattered and isolated groups of tens or hundreds of courageous individuals, afraid, alone, and picked off one by one by the police. If our hope is that protest-porn videos of outrages and brutality will so transform the conscience of the country that, at last, real political progress becomes unstoppable, then I guess we should keep doing what we’re doing, but even then, one has to wonder: What will make this go-around different than all the others past? Perhaps the answer is the scale, the duration, and the intensity of the uprising, or simply the unique – and uniquely, terrifyingly fraught – historical moment at which it comes.

We can hope.

Final thoughts: My partner commented the other day, in reflecting on lessons from the anti-CAA protests in India, “New York needs a Shaheen Bagh.” At the time, I couldn’t quite imagine what this would look like, but as the Post reports that the “NYPD faces first major budget cut in decades” (with City Council leadership asking “the NYPD for a list of proposed cuts equaling 5 to 7 percent of the agency’s budget by Monday after [NYPD] brass offered to eliminate just under 1 percent”), and as the City faces multi-billion-dollar budget shortfalls, perhaps the place for New York’s Shaheen Bagh – which is to say, it’s standing occupation of public space to demand political action commensurate to the scale of the targeted problem – is City Hall itself. Already, de Blasio has introduced $2.7 billion in budget cuts – in large part from programs benefitting young people, schools, and the environment – and yet, isn’t the NYPD budget nearly $6 billion per year?

I can imagine a standing, 24-hour-a-day occupation of the entire, large, triangular block with contains City Hall, a round-the-clock occupation for “the city that never sleeps” demanding that the Mayor and the City Council drastically reduce the NYPD budget, slash the size of the force, and take other steps within their purview to increase police accountability. (I’m being intentionally vague here because many of the relevant steps probably have to be taken at the state level, and, of course, the point can be made that past such occupations – in the US and outside of it – have failed just as past mass uprisings have.)

Immediate, foreseeable pitfalls will be that police – if their budget is threatened – will move to make life in the City harder than it already is. After years of organizing led, at last, to bail reform last year in Albany, we witnessed an immediate backlash and concerted public relations campaign to make it seem as if these modest reforms had led to a massive city-wide crime wave. And that was just bail reform. Think back to the early days of de Blasio’s time as mayor, when he took a stand – in the aftermath of Eric Garner’s murder by NYPD officer, Daniel Pantaleo – that was viewed, by the NYPD writ large, as “anti-police,” and then two police officers were murdered, for which de Blasio was, by the NYPD writ large, blamed. Take note that one police officer was stabbed last night in Brooklyn and two others shot. Now imagine the public relations push and campaign of police subversion of basic municipal functioning that would likely follow if a few billion dollars came out of that bloated NYPD budget.

We have an impossible struggle on our hands, but it looks very much like the fight for the future. We don’t make it easier for ourselves by repeating old mistakes, nor do we strengthen our position by making ourselves easy prey to a militarized and predatory opponent eager for any opportunity to pounce.

Post-script: In the face of all the white flailing, the “listening,” the absurdity of #BlackoutTuesday, the long lists of unsolicited “recommendations” from white people, I’d like to again quote my partner (“People in this country don’t even know how to bandh right.”) and to point to a tremendous Insta post from Queens rapper, lyrical virtuoso, and my former student, Archduke Redcat, in which he points out that #BlackoutTuesday was “created literally yesterday” but has “[m]illions more […] posts” than #BlackLivesMatter, and that, “People publicly stating my life, and many others, matters is meaningful,” while #BlackoutTuesday is just “an instagram trend.” He goes on to urge people:

Now again, there is a link in my bio for things you can do, even if you don’t have any money, even if you need to avoid coronavirus, even if you posted a black square, do something. For once. Do something. Anything. Link in my bio and make something happen. Being silent for a day is LITERALLY the opposite of the goal here. Solidarity isn’t take a break to think about black people, it’s doing anything to rectify the wrongdoings of this nation’s dominant populace. and btw KEEP DOING STUFF. Keep reflecting, keep thinking, keep protesting, keep donating, keep sharing, keep learning, keep informing, keep on keeping on. #protestsafely and happy pride.

Please, go check out his post, and after you have, go check out his music as well and consider making one of the things you do buying an album or two by this rising star out of Queens. Redcat EP and I still Wanna Have Fun are two great places to start.